What is Depression?

What is Depression?

Almost 10% of the American adult population suffers from depression, an astounding 19 million people.link

Depression among preschoolers is increasing 23% per year and they represent the fastest growing market for antidepressants.link

What’s wrong with this picture?

All of us will experience depression at times during our lives. You know the feeling. It’s like being underwater … or not being sure how to breathe. A peculiar heaviness makes everything difficult. Even moving your body becomes a challenge.

The millions of people taking anti depressants often experience temporary relief, which can be a virtual lifesaver. But did you know that, historically, anti-depressants were prescribed as an accompaniment to some form of therapeutic process? The purpose of the drug was to provide a breath of fresh air so that the patient – in concert with their support team – could gain a perspective and understanding of the circumstances in their life that caused the depression. Today, more often than not, only drugs are prescribed and the root causes are not explored.

We invite our clients to ask themselves: what will it take for you to integrate the painful aspects of your life?

Depression is not dead weight. It is fuel for life. But, that fuel must be burned.

TV advertisements assure us that pills will take away our depression, thereby solving our problems and restoring our previously happy life (just look at the before and after images… what a transformation!). While appropriate medications can work miracles for people, unless the underlying circumstances that are producing symptoms are not attended to, suppressed symptoms will go somewhere else in the body.

What is Depression?

After years of working with people in our Medical Intuitive practice, we’ve come to appreciate depression as a valid stage within an individual’s evolution. We have learned how to assist people to reclaim the strength that often gets sapped by illness. Depression can be used as a catalyst for honest comprehension of circumstances that have changed or must change for the next chapter of life to open.

In other words, depression can be used to your advantage. Depression can become a lever to get you unstuck, especially in the midst of a physical illness.

photo by David C. MacKenzie

Life is astoundingly complex, designed to provide us an entire spectrum of experience from the very highs to the very lows. Yes, there are many things in the world today that we can sadden ourselves over. But to feel uncertainty, fear and sorrow is a symptom of life itself. And compassion, which is a revelation of heartfelt understanding, can be enlivened by the gift of depression. As Thomas Moore wrote in Care of the Soul: “Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence.”

If you’re feeling stuck in the heaviness and doubt that sometimes occurs in the healing process, please invite our help.

Let us help your depression bloom into understanding, so that the darkness you feel can be met by the light of a new day and open a new chapter in your life. After all, darkness is no more than the absence of light.

Quoting again from Moore: “What if ‘depression’ were simply a state of being, neither good nor bad, something the Soul does in its own good time and for its own good reasons.”

We respect the cycles in your life. What you are feeling is … what you are feeling! For good reason. Let us help you discover what those reasons are and turn depression into liberation.